Writing of the Jews as a "people of solitaries," E.M. Cioran, the most dazzling French philosophical voice since Paul Valery, observes of the Jewish "nation" that this people, "...unsuited to the complacencies of despair, bypassing its age-old fatigue and the conclusions imposed by fate, lives in the delirium of expectation, determined not to learn a lesson from its humiliations...."

Cioran's observation is astute. With the current Sharon plan for releasing Palestinian terrorists and surrendering Jewish lands, Israel has given new meaning to such "determination." Rejecting both Zionism and Judaism in the codified madness of "disengagement," the Prime Minister is openly comfortable with a policy that is indefensible by any reasonable standard of judgment. Withering every authentically Jewish heart and mind with his policy of "Land For Nothing," the Prime Minister proudly shows off an infinite forbearance for Israel's mortal enemies, past and future; foreign and domestic. Small wonder, then, that Sharon has now brazenly brought Israel to its final phase of unwitting self-parody.

What, after all, is being offered by the Arab side? Peace? Surely everyone must know that a "ceasefire" is strongly in the interest of the Palestinians, giving them needed time to reorganize unrepentant terrorist forces and to replenish terrorist materials. They are, after all, quickly running short of nails, screws, razor blades and rat poison for the vests of their "freedom fighters."

Newly freed by Israel from worry about targeted killings of their lead murderers, Palestinian terrorists are already being reborn as Palestinian "police" and "security services." Here, with the incomprehensible blessings of the United States -- and with an additional $350 million of our tax monies -- the meticulously sanitized and media-transformed killers can spearhead a new momentum for "Palestine."

Of course, the Palestinian state, torn from the still-living body of a Jewish state, will immediately become a base for terrorist operations against both Israel and the United States. Why, why - we must inquire: Why do our own intelligence services maintain absolute public silence about expanding cooperation between several interpenetrating Palestinian "authorities" and al-Qaeda? Common links in this cooperation are such fiery preachers as Sheikh Mudeiris, who receive their salaries and their appointments from the Palestinian National Authority.

Prime Minister Sharon shows no evident reluctance to fawn before Israel's intended executioners. Shall Israel survive under such leadership? Perhaps. Yet, by agreeing to live comfortably on its knees, by forgetting its utterly sacred obligations to those legions of honored and heroic Jews who now sleep in the dust, the nation has arguably lost all right to do so.

Who are Israel's intended executioners? Enemies who are irrevocably and doctrinally committed to destruction of the Third Temple Commonwealth, it makes no difference at all if they are Hamas, or Islamic Jihad or Fatah. None. Not a single Palestinian group accepts the idea of a "Two-State Solution" -- the delusionary mantra animating Secretary of State Rice as well as Prime Minister Sharon. On the official PA map of the Middle East there is no Israel. Only "Palestine."

The wider Arab plan is still to remove Israel not only from the maps, but also to expunge it from the physical world amidst rivers of blood and whole oceans of religious poetry. Hence the cartographic genocide is blueprint -- a premeditated design for the next "phase." The language here is precise and meaningful.

The "Phased Plan" was adopted formally by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) on June 9, 1974. In its 12th session, the PLO's highest body, the Palestinian National Council, reiterated the PLO aim: "...to achieve their rights to return and to self-determination on the whole of their homeland." However, departing from a previous strategy then calling for immediate annihilation of "The Zionist Entity," and for the establishment of a 23rd Arab state covering "all of Palestine," the Phased Plan adopted the following unambiguous goals: "FIRST, to establish a combatant national authority over every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated" (Art. 2); SECOND, to use that territory to continue the fight against Israel (Art. 4); and THIRD, to start "a pan-Arab War to complete the liberation of all Palestinian territory; that is, to annihilate Israel" (Art. 8).

"To annihilate Israel" has never been a hidden element of Arab strategy. Since June 9, 1974, nothing has changed. In Muslim parlance, all war dictated by the shari'a is necessarily "holy." Yet, the Arabic word jihad, which has the literal meaning of "effort," "striving," or "struggle," ought not to be taken lightly. A basic commandment of Islam, jihad -- still a favorite term of Israel's "partners in peace" -- is an obligation imposed on all Muslims by Allah, and is patently military in intent.

Derived from the universality of Muslim revelation, jihad calls upon those who have accepted Allah's message and Allah's word to strive (jahada) relentlessly to convert, or, at a minimum, to subjugate those who have not been converted. Regarding the State of Israel, this obligation is not bounded by any ascertainable limits of time or space. Indeed, this obligation must continue until the whole world has accepted Islam or has submitted to the power of the Islamic state.

What is the prevailing Islamic worldview for the interim? It is that the world remains divided in two: the House of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the House of War (dar al-Harb). In the House of Islam, Muslims rule and the law of Islam already prevails. In the House of War, which comprises the rest of the world, a constant struggle against the unbeliever is morally, legally and religiously obligatory. No authentic political compromises are possible. No conclusion to the struggle is acceptable short of a final and total military triumph. Significantly, the law books permit the state of war to be interrupted, when expedient, by an armistice or truce or "ceasefire" or treaty of limited duration. This state of belligerency can never be properly terminated by a peace that is not founded upon a final victory.

Could anything be clearer? Throughout the Islamic world, Sharon's humiliating and futile pleas for "peace" will be exploited eagerly by Israel's intended executioners. Today, with Sharon's "disengagement," these soldiers of jihad, including even the Egyptians (who negotiated a markedly self-serving "interruption" in their own 1979 treaty with Israel), can hardly believe their good fortune. Can the "Jews" (significantly, it is always the Jews in Arab/Islamic parlance, never the Israelis) really be fooled this easily?

For Islam, the unsubjugated unbeliever -- in our present concerns, the Jew -- is by definition the enemy. A part of the dar-al-Harb, the House of War, he is differentiated sharply from the dhimmi, the unbeliever who submits to Muslim rule. As for a presumably Jewish State, one that rules over Muslims and that "occupies" Muslim lands, it is nothing less than the very incarnation of unbelief, an intolerable source of contamination and a codified inversion of Allah's will. Such a state can be fit only for extermination. It is, in the language of today's Arab textbooks, a language drawn from revered Nazi mentors, "filth."

When Haj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, spoke together with Hitler on Berlin Radio, in 1942, he cried out: "Kill the Jews -- kill them with your hands, kill them with your teeth - this is well pleasing to Allah." Today, the infamous PLO call for annihilation of Israel STILL remains at certain official PA websites and publications, and the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) STILL calls for the "realization of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: 'The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, killing them.'"

Only a few years ago, the Palestine Authority (PA) radio station (Voice of Palestine) broadcast the following sermon at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque. It instructed all Muslims to recall that Israel is a transient part of Palestine and that Israel's survival is strongly "forbidden by religious law:"

The land of Muslim Palestine is a single unit which cannot be divided. There is no difference between Haifa and Nablus, between Lod and Ramallah, between Jerusalem and Nazareth. The division of the land of Palestine into cantons and the recognition of the occupation is forbidden by religious law, since the land of Palestine is sacred Wakf land for the benefit of all Muslims, east and west. No one has the right to divide it or give up any of it. The liberation of Palestine is obligatory for all the Islamic nations and not only for our Palestinian nation.... All Israeli politicians across their entire political spectrum, regardless of their labels, they all have a single Zionist view embodied in the occupation of the land and the establishment of the Zionist entity at the expense of the Muslim Palestinian land... Allah shall free the captives and the prisoners, Allah shall grant victory to our jihad warriors.

Sharon's Israel -- however much it may lack the "single Zionist view" alleged by its intended executioners and however much it is willing to sacrifice for "peace" -- will remain despised in the Arab/Islamic Middle East. It will be loathed exactly as Israel was loathed in Barak's Middle East, as it was loathed in Netanyahu's Middle East, as it was loathed in Begin's Middle East, and as it was loathed originally in Ben-Gurion's Middle East.

It will remain hated in the Arab/Islamic world because it is a Jewish State. To its enemies. that is Israel's irremediable and unforgivable sin. It will cease to be hated only on the day that it would finally offer politely to disappear, and even on that cursed day there would be posthumous loathing among Israel's current "partners for peace." This loathing would extend even to all those Jews and Christians who might remain to mourn over the battered corpse of Israel.

To be sure, Israel's intended executioners -- within and outside the Green Line -- have now found the Sharon "disengagement" plan for surrender yet another good cause for revulsion. Under this unprecedented formula for incremental Jewish disappearance, Israel will continue to hope too much, to wallow in engineered delusion, to waste critical strength in vain concessions, to elicit still-growing enmity by its weary capitulations and -- above all -- to learn nothing, absolutely nothing, from its inexcusable humiliations.

To be sure, we must never allow this to happen.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Jewish Press. All rights reserved.

LOUIS RENE BERES was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and articles dealing with terrorism, nuclear strategy, nuclear war and international law. Professor Beres is Strategic and Military Affairs columnist for The Jewish Press.